A couple more people breached the threshold, begging to board. More outside tried to follow.
“A little help here?” Hashim shouted, his hands too full with his scrawny nurse-in-training and the guy who brought him to stop the flood of other bodies.
Bob whipped a shotgun at the door and ordered off the invading masses, but they kept pushing inward with heated guilt trips. One of them claimed racism, like that was going to help.
A sudden bang startled Hashim into turning with his pistol up.
Bob’s barrel smoked as he stared in sad wonder at the body now sprawled on the stairs.
“Jex, murder!” someone outside cried out, which was carried by others.
Hashim dropped Pepe onto the nearest seat with a quick apology and rushed to Bob’s side with his gun up, shouting, “Y’all get back or you’ll be next.”
The crowd shouted viciously at him, throwing terms like traitor and Uncle Tom at him while still pushing inward. Then came banging all around the bus, which started to rock. This wasn’t begging anymore; this was a full-blown riot, which left him with only one choice.
“Drive,” he shouted, his heart racing as he blew away two more invaders before the hollering rioters started backing away from the door.
“We can’t drive through this,” Bob shouted over the ruckus.
More gunfire erupted, this time from outside. Hashim glanced left and caught a few jexes heading right for them, and none of them looked like they were ready to listen to reason. He tried to close the door again, but it got stuck on the bodies still hanging in the stairway. He cursed, then shouted back, “We’ve got no choice. Gunners, clear the way for him!”
Moses’ heavy guns roared to life, which made some of the mob run in odd directions for cover. Though he didn’t see anyone fall, he was long past caring if anyone out there got hit.
“I’m still exposed,” Bob said as he changed gears, his weapon in his lap.
“I’ll cover you,” Hashim shouted as he aimed at the door. “Just get us out of here.”
The bus pushed against the mob, who somehow remained convinced they could hold an armored motor coach at bay. The grinding of the engine agreed, but Moses moved in spite of them. Sadly, Hashim had to shoot down another unfortunate soul trying to jump aboard.
After kicking the bodies out of the stairway and making sure the door closed, he returned to Pepe while Gilda was patching him up. “How bad is he?” he shouted over the thumping gunfire.
“Just a knock to the face,” Gilda replied in kind. “He doesn’t remember what happened.”
“I made him tell me where to take him,” the stranger said in shaky Spanish.
Pepe’s hand swung out lamely before grasping the stranger’s arm with a smile. “You saved my life,” the kid wearily said in kind. “What’s your name?”
The stranger smiled weakly. “Hector.”
“Welcome aboard, Hector,” Hashim said. “Grab a seat while we try to survive this place.”
“Hey, hey!” Nick shouted, bouncing up and down in his seat like a brainy kid in class with the answer to a math problem. “I got some more signals—hell, a lot of them!”
“You really think now’s the time?” Clarissa shouted.
“They’re bouncing between here and a location south of here,” he prattled on. “They’re status reports, not as short as before.”
The exasperated teacher rolled her eyes, but Cody leaned up a little and addressed the prattle. “Seventy … miles south?”
Nick frowned at the injured medic. “Yeah. How did you know?”
Cody sank back with a disturbed look in his eye, taking a few breaths before answering. “Fort Carson’s down there. Maybe … someone’s alive there.”
A gunshot dinged the armor closest to Hashim. He glanced up at the thumping gun above him, then at Cody. “I don’t think I want to meet anymore survivors out here.”
Cody placed a weak hand on Hashim’s shoulder. “I don’t blame you, but we’re … heading that way anyway. Right now … we need to get everybody … out of this city safely.”
The word everybody told Hashim exactly what they were doing next. He just hoped the tanker didn’t get blown up without more support than one night guard riding shotgun.
*****
The Gamesman paced outside the fence while the crowd watched in near silence. The B&D Bandits all around maintained their aim at Didi’s head. Somehow her legend didn’t include the fact that she was dead, so she wondered if these guys were either trained to be deliberate or just that jumpy.
Rachelle and Isaac watched helplessly at gunpoint near the door.
Didi’s options were extremely limited, and her distance from the exit was her only advantage. She didn’t need to see any of their faces that clearly.
“Rockwell was a friend,” the Gamesman said, then stopped and smiled at her, “but this is a game of justice. Besides, business is business, and the Death Doll should be quite a draw.”
“As long as you get my nose right,” she quipped. “Big hang-up.”
He scoffed. “But how do I keep you here? You’re not an animal, so I can’t keep you locked up in this cage … unless you make me,” he added with a pointed glare. “Your little friend would make good insurance, but I’m a man of my word, so she’s free to go. I just wonder if you would fight for him,” he added with a nod at Isaac, then Rachelle, “as hard as you did for her.”
“Hurt him and you’ll find out.”
One of the guards smacked the cage with the butt of his shotgun, but she didn’t flinch or break eye contact with their swanky master, whose grin seemed to find new ways of growing.
“Trust is a gamble,” the Gamesman said, “but I am all about gambling. Give your word you’ll stay and they walk right now.”
“No way,” Rachelle shouted while stepping forward, but her guard cocked his shotgun and aimed right in her face. “You said I could go.”
Didi waved her down. “Thanks, but I’m good. Go on, both of you.”
Rachelle and Isaac flinched simultaneously, then regarded each other. Isaac frowned back at Didi. “You’re not letting this fool—”
“Go,” she said sincerely, praying he would do as she said.
He gawked at her for a long moment before nodding and backing up. “Fine,” he said as he threw up his arms and walked away. Rachelle looked fretfully at Didi but followed him.
“Stop,” the Gamesman said.
Isaac and Rachelle stopped and faced him as his guards advanced on them.
Didi regarded the Gamesman, whose smile grew wider still. “You didn’t actually agree.”
She silently cursed her luck, but realized her friends were just far enough away. She cracked a guilty grin at the Gamesman. “Caught that, huh?”
His eyes narrowed at her and he found yet another way to grin at her. “You are clever. You could’ve lied, but you implied. That tells me your word really means something to you.” His grin quickly disappeared. “Give it now … or they die now.”
The guards aimed at her friends’ heads. It was now or never. “Kill them and you’ll have nothing keeping me here.”
“This is my ring,” the Gamesman said gruffly. “No one leaves without my blessing.”
Didi pulled a grenade from her jacket and yanked out the pin. “Wanna bet?” she said before tossing the grenade at the foot of the door and backing up.
The Gamesman’s eyes grew wide as one of his guards tackled him to the ground.
Isaac jumped on Rachelle and covered her.
The explosion blasted the door right into the bullpen, taking with it two of the guards stupid enough to stand their ground. The nearest spectators ducked for cover.
Gunfire erupted as jexes advanced, prompting the crowd to flee as smoke filled the cage. Gun barrels flashed in various directions throughout the miasma.
Didi headed for where she remembered the doorway to be, crossing the threshold as the haze started to clear. She found her friends shooting at or cutting do
wn nearby jexes. She drew her sword to help them finish up when a jex jumped her from the side. A brief struggle and a hard punch put him out cold before she realized the guys who took her pistols were lying unconscious beside them. She took back her weapons and holstered them before telling her companions, “Let’s get out of here before they bring the whole city down on us.”
Isaac and Rachelle nodded and fought their way to the exit.
A grunt drew Didi’s attention to a guard with his back ripped to shreds, what was left pinning the Gamesman to the floor. She planted the tip of her blade on the boss man’s forehead.
Oddly, he just smiled up at her. “I take it this isn’t a negotiating tactic.”
Didi considered running him through, but she couldn’t blow her shot at redemption by being that kind of monster. “Don’t follow us,” she warned him, then ran away.
She reached her defenders with enough ease, but the fleeing crowds grew too thick to negotiate. More gunshots erupted around her, coming from Rachelle and Isaac.
“We gonna need a big-assed shovel to dig our way out of this shit,” the latter said.
And who shoveled the most in the last five minutes? she thought. She went back to the cage.
CHAPTER 11
OUT OF HELL
What the hell did we just fall into? Alan thought as he watched lots of leather-clad psychos shoot at the bus from armored cars and trucks like in a Mad Max movie. Worse yet, the people running said bus wouldn’t let him or his brother use any of the guns bolted to the overhead compartments to help defend it. The middle managers—the Panel, the others called them for some reason—let only half the other people do the shooting, forcing everyone else to duck behind their seats. Of course, it wouldn’t have been wise to arm their vicious teen prisoner—who they taped down to a middle seat—or the frigid suicide case bound right behind her. The skinny new Arab kept his nose in his laptop with no mind to the chaos whatsoever, so not him.
“Have you … heard from Didi yet?” the sweaty guy in the stretcher seats asked weakly.
“Still at the stadium,” the Native American driver said. Then he eyed the tablet mounted above the radio. “We’re a few blocks out, but I don’t know how we’re getting there through all this.”
“Same way we’re getting out of town at this rate,” the older gent Hashim said grimly. “The bloody way.”
“This is a madhouse,” Alan declared.
“This is nothing,” said the guy on the front pedestal. “You should’ve seen the gang that ran us out of our home the other day.”
“You’re kidding, right?” came from the checkered blond middle-manager shooting out the slits with a frown. “There’s a whole lot more of these guys right now.”
“But the gang was better armed.”
Alan peered out the little slit. His eyes widened at what the jexes started pulling out of the pursuing vehicles, and he quickly ducked down. “Did the gang have rocket launchers?”
The tall guy glanced out the slit with equal fright, then took a couple of carefully aimed shots. Alan didn’t bother to look up to see whether or not that helped. Then the guy ducked down to reload his gun, telling Hashim, “Should we break out the grenades?”
“We have grenades?” Alan muttered hopefully.
“No way, Craig,” Hashim said firmly. “Those are Didi’s call, and I don’t want to use them on the living unless we absolutely have to.”
“The people shooting us aren’t reason enough?” Aaron snapped.
The two Panel guys rolled their eyes. The white one muttered, “This is why we control the guns.” The black one smirked in agreement.
“So what’s to stop us from taking one?” the asshole muttered as he stood to grab the revolver mounted above him, only to find a shotgun barrel shoved into his face.
“This is also why we isolate newcomers,” Hashim said behind the shotgun.
Aaron quickly released the handle and sat back down.
Alan couldn’t help rolling his eyes at the whole situation, and he got his twin’s elbow in the arm for it. This was what they left their tried and true airport for?
“Brace yourselves,” the older driver hollered back.
Alan looked out the windshield and saw the big stadium looming over a massive mob of people running right toward the bus—no, away from the stadium—in all directions before a flame spurted through the slit over him. He ducked and covered with only a few hairs singed on the side of his head.
Hashim appeared over him and shot out the slit. “Judge and execute this!” Then he grabbed an overhead bar and half-knelt onto the seat.
Before Alan could do the same, the bus cut a hard left that threw his face into the seatback, the rest of him spilling into his brother’s lap like he was in one of those spinning spaceship rides at a fair. Whoever got his feet shoved them off and yelled sharply at him for kicking them.
When centrifugal force released him, he scrabbled out of Aaron’s lap and sat in his seat, making sure to buckle up just as he watched a jex in a truck ahead of the bus prepare to ram it, ferrying some leather-clad jerk in the bed with something burning in his hand.
Alan cursed loudly and eyed the pistol mounted above Aaron, but the thumping machine gun above him forced him to cover his ears. With his eyes open, he could see the truck ahead getting pummeled by bullets and the guy holding the flame in back getting blasted off. The truck veered off and crashed loudly somewhere Alan couldn’t see.
“I see them,” came from the gun above.
The bus swerved right and headed for the coliseum again. This time, the fleeing bodies had thinned out a bit, but the number of jexes seemed to quadruple. His only saving grace was that they were all aiming at the stadium.
“Hold your fire,” Hashim shouted down the length of the bus.
Everyone with a gun immediately stopped shooting and faced forward, still holding onto the overhead bars as they gawked out the windshield in wonder.
The bus slowed to a creep, then stopped just before the line of armed jexes outside the stadium.
An eerie silence fell over the scene. After all that loud gunfire, Alan could barely even hear the bus’ engine still running, but he only cared about what was about to happen outside.
The center of the firing line slowly—begrudgingly—parted, revealing the Death Doll with a pistol aimed at the head of some tall, well-dressed guy in white. Behind her walked her two wary companions, who changed their aim to each sneering face they passed.
“Another prisoner?” Aaron muttered.
A whole damn city bearing down on them, and that’s all the asshole could think about? Alan shook his head.
Didi and her pals entered the bus to find Hashim smiling at them with glorious surprise. “It’s as if you don’t really need us,” he joked.
Didi waved him off with her free hand. “Don’t be silly. A good ride is hard to find these days. Get comfy, Gameboy,” she added while shoving the man in soiled white into the seat behind the driver. “It’s a few miles to the edge of town.”
Gameboy, whoever he was, sneered defiantly at the closing door, then at Didi. “Then what?” he asked with more bass in his voice than fear. Actually, there wasn’t an ounce of the latter.
Didi shrugged. “Then I toss you out, safe and sound, like I said. I like to keep my word, too.”
“Well, I give you my word, Death Doll,” he said like he didn’t believe who she was, “I won’t let this stand.”
She grabbed her sword handle, then smirked at him. “Good thing you’re sitting, or else things might get unpleasant.”
The new prisoner’s sneer slowly grew into a maniacal grin.
Alan wasn’t sure teasing this guy was such a good idea, but at least, for the moment, no one shot at the bus.
*****
Tensions shot up when the Ford and the tanker truck didn’t meet the bus at the city limits, which led to some threats against the pimp-looking Gamesman before the driver told the other head honchos he had sent the other tw
o vehicles down to Colorado Springs during the gunfight. A call to those trucks settled that argument in short order. So, they dropped off the city’s smug master and high-tailed it south, and Aaron watched the fly brother fade into the horizon without a single car or truck to pursue them. So much for not letting things stand.
When nerves cooled off, everybody complained about the cold coming in from those tiny windows stretching across the bus, even after closing the shutters above the slits. Kids cuddled up to their parents—some who looked nothing like their offspring—as did a few couples. The vents on the ceiling and the floor blew enough hot hair into the bus to fill a blimp, but everyone else’s teeth and knees chattered like squirrels eating nuts.
Aaron didn’t have that problem. No, sir. He was quite warm in the presence of all these women. Some were barely one-night-stand worthy, but some were straight up centerfold quality, and they all stoked his libido like lusty logs in a fireplace.
Sadly, the sexiest one was flat-chested—and dead—so she didn’t count. The next prettiest spent her time either breastfeeding her baby, changing it, or getting puked on by it. The bronze medal went to an aged blonde with friggin’ triplets, so HELL NO! The rest looked like either haggard housewives or semi-butch lezzies, or they were just too young. Maybe.
Then there was the priss in that tight, pale blue dress with itty bitty flowers on it. Her light brown hair dangled in messy curls that needed a wash, and her nose may have suffered someone’s fist, but her soft brown eyes beckoned from her creamy white skin in an innocent way that begged to be taught something. Her scrawny hands clutched her arm rests for dear life, probably because of how tightly her arms had been taped down, but her sumptuous lips could sure tame a savage beast. One of her slim legs bounced from the ball of her foot, which must’ve been anxiously waiting for some kind of thrill. Opportunity!
He left the seat next to his boring twin and planted himself beside the refined beauty. She stared up at the ceiling like it was the most captivating thing, or maybe luring him in with her wiles. He tested the waters with a basic hello, but she kept gawking upward.
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